24-Year-Old Stop, Frisk Victim Weeps: ‘I Felt Criminalized’

NEW YORK (AP) — A 24-year-old nonprofit worker wept on the witness stand Tuesday as he described an unnerving episode of being handcuffed near his home while an officer took his keys and went inside his building.

Nicholas Pert, who is black, is one of about a dozen New Yorkers expected to tell their stories of being stopped, questioned and frisked by police in a federal trial challenging how police use the tactic. About 5 million stops have been made during the past decade, mostly of black and Hispanic men.

The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of some of the stops, with lawyers arguing the policy unfairly targets minorities.

City attorneys said officers operate within the law and do not target people solely because of their race. Police go where the crime is — and crime is overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods, city lawyers said.

Pert’s mother died of cancer, and he is the guardian for his three siblings, two small boys and his disabled 20-year-old sister. The stocky community college graduate testified that he was stopped four times, starting on his 18th birthday.

But it was a stop in 2011 that reduced him to tears.

He testified that he was walking to the corner store at about 11 p.m. to get milk when officers stopped him, handcuffed him and put him in the back of a squad car. One officer took Pert’s keys, he said, and went into his building. Pert said he was concerned because he didn’t know how his siblings would react if the officer knocked on the door.

“I was afraid he would go into my apartment, and I wasn’t there to take care of the situation,” he said.

Eventually the officer returned and he was freed.

Pert said, pausing to collect himself, that he felt criminalized by the episode.

“To be treated like that, by someone who works for New York City, I felt degraded and helpless,” he said.

Lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the class-action suit, are trying to show a pattern of racist and inappropriate behavior by the police.